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The Chandler family’s home in Indianapolis, designed by the architectural firm Deborah Berke Partners. The 3,500-square-foot home was completed in 2016.Credit
Kevin Miyazaki for The New York Times

Modernist Magic in Indiana

An Indianapolis family with a historical connection to modern architecture found inspiration for their new home in a piece of land, a nearby town and an Eero Saarinen creation.

By JULIE LASKYOCT. 1, 2017

Some home-building projects start with an itch for more space. Others with a love of customization. One house that lies low and lean across a bumpy patch of Indianapolis began with a run in the woods.

For years, Bryan Chandler, the president of a commercial real estate firm and a runner, had cut across a parcel of land that was sliced by a creek and crowned by a 40-foot hill. In 2012, on one of his jaunts, he discovered that the property was for sale and bought it.

But what to do with it? He and his wife, Mary, were living with their three children in a 1950s traditional-style home in Indianapolis. “We weren’t looking to move from the house where we had brought our kids home from the hospital,” Ms. Chandler recalled. “But we had talked for some time in an indefinite way about some day perhaps building a modern house.”

Ms. Chandler has a historical connection to modern architecture, as the chief executive of the Cummins Foundation. Founded in 1954 by J. Irwin Miller, chairman of Cummins Engine Company, the foundation spurred the transformation of nearby Columbus, Ind., into a modernist showplace by paying the architectural fees for some of its most distinguished public buildings.

Ms. Berke called the Chandler kitchen’s blue ceramic tile wall “a tip of the hat” to a blue glass mosaic wall in the kitchen of the Miller House of Columbus, Ind., that was completed by Eero Saarinen in 1957.Credit
Kevin Miyazaki for The New York Times

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Above left: Mary and Bryan Chandler with their dog, Buddy, at home in August. Above right: The bedroom of one of the Chandlers’ three children.Credit
Kevin Miyazaki for The New York Times

Among the houses that interested the Chandlers was the Millers’ own residence, a flat-topped structure of steel, slate and glass completed in 1957 by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. “It helped us imagine how a family might live in a modern home,” Mr. Chandler said.

He gave them only one: Deborah Berke. A practitioner of emotionally intelligent minimalism who is also dean of Yale University’s architecture school, Ms. Berke and her 2006 Irwin Union Bank branch figure into the plot of “Columbus,” a new feature film about the town and its accumulation of modernist architecture. This year, she completed the Cummins Distribution Headquarters, a mixed-use complex downtown.

Ms. Berke’s design for the Chandlers evokes the Miller House’s strategic, glass-walled transparency, its use of eloquent materials and its overhanging flat roof.

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Deborah Berke and her 2006 Irwin Union Bank branch figure into the plot of “Columbus,” a feature film about the town of Columbus, Ind., and its accumulation of modernist architecture.Credit
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The 3,500-square-foot Chandler house, like the Miller House, has separate wings for parents and children, with a large, communal space in between. The kitchen has a showstopping blue ceramic tile wall that Ms. Berke called “a tip of the hat” to the Miller kitchen’s wall of blue glass mosaic tile.

Both houses follow a larger modernist agenda to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, turn views into slowly transforming kinetic artworks and soothe as well as shelter. But however much the Chandlers admired the Miller House, “they didn’t want a copy of it, obviously,” Ms. Berke said. What she offered was fitted to their needs and the remarkable site.

Completed last fall for about $300 per square foot, the zinc-paneled structure with mahogany-framed windows sits at the top of the property. A curving driveway leads from the road through oak, sycamore, maple and walnut trees, and the land behind the building quickly drops down into a meadow.

The centerpiece of the interior is a living/dining area with long stretches on either side of thermally efficient glass. This space is divided by a wall paneled in heart pinewood and a cubic space of the same material, in which the kitchen is tucked. Mr. Chandler obtained the wood from the beams of a dismantled 1900 baking powder factory in Terre Haute, Ind.

The house also has many small, private rooms. The Chandlers asked for his-and-her home offices and a bedroom and bathroom for each of their children, now ages 19, 18 and 14. “We basically have the same space as the kids,” Ms. Chandler said, noting that bathrooms are just large enough to “maneuver in without hitting an elbow or a head” and that televisions are banned from bedrooms, herding family members into the common areas.

The Chandlers’ master bedroom. The views change from room to room, and from season to season.Credit
Kevin Miyazaki for The New York Times

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The house, as seen from the meadow behind it. Mr. Chandler discovered the site while he was out for a run in 2012.Credit
Kevin Miyazaki for The New York Times

The views change from room to room, grander in the public spaces and more tightly framed in private ones. They also change drastically from season to season. Indiana, Ms. Berke pointed out, oscillates between snow-carpeted panoramas and hot summer greenery. The perspectives exploit — and the house is insulated against — both extremes.

Surrounding the building, beneath the roof overhang, is a landscaped area Ms. Berke calls “the plinth.” Irregular in surface (some parts are paved in limestone, others planted with pachysandra, and a very small bit is consumed by an outdoor shower), the plinth slows and smooths the transition between interior and exterior.

It is here, on a luxuriant terrace, that the family soaks up morning rays or watches deer emerge from the forest to graze in the evening. For Ms. Chandler, the primary mission was a visceral connection between the building, occupants and outdoors. “And in fact that interaction — the sunlight in the house, the doors that all open, the way that we walk in and out to the patio and look at the bald eagle that flies over the meadow — is really the way that we live,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2017, on Page F8 of the New York edition with the headline: Modernist Magic in Indiana. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe